Please Pray for Chrissie!

Chrissie with her Dad at the Princess party her family threw for her the night before her surgery

A year ago, shortly after we had arrived in Serbia, I visited an institution for children with disabilities in northern Serbia. The visit broke my heart. I wrote about it in a post last year, but for those of you who were not reading the newly-created blog at that time, this place was (and is) "home" to 200 disabled children, and the conditions (although this particular institution is regarded as one of the best in the country) were deplorable. It was clean, but the warehousing of children is never a good idea, and the vast majority of children were laying in their cribs, obviously severely undernoursihed and understimulated. It was just very, very sad.


While I wanted to scoop all 200 kids up and bring them home with me, one particular child in that institution captured my attention during that visit. Her name was Barbara, and she was out of her bed, running around, talking and smiling. Frankly, she seemed like a very typically-developing child and I couldn't figure out why she had been institutionalized. I later learned that she had a serious heart condition, and that her Mother had left her at the hospital after she was born, believing that no medical solution was available to save sweet Barbara's life.

After the visit, I was determined to get this child's medical records and to find someone in Tennessee (a good friend's husband happens to be one of the premiere pediatric cardiac surgeons in the country!!) who might be willing to operate on Barbara. Along the way, we had some friends who were interested in adopting Barbara, but once we started to pursue this avenue, we learned that this child was already on the radar screen of Reece's Rainbow, an organization in the U.S. that facilitates internation adoptions of children with special needs. In October, a family from Texas adopted Barbara, and she's been home with the Patterson family for 6 months now.

Barbara, whose name has been changed to Christyn Joy (Chrissie), had open heart surgery last Monday. Apparently, she died on the table, but was revived, and until this past weekend, was in a medically-induced coma. This sweet little girl is literally laying on a table in a hospital in San Antonio, TX with her chest open, and they are trying to bring her out of her coma. Although she is still in a very grave medical condition, her family reports through their blog that she is beginning to move a bit and to show other signs of neurological functioning.

In the hospital

This little girl is a miracle child -- given all of the abnormalities of her heart, she frankly never should have lived four days, let alone four years! This is a really critical time in her life, though, and she needs your prayers! Please visit her family's website at http://allarepreciousinhissight.blogspot.com/ to read about what is going on with Chrissie and her family.